A federal grand jury has indicted former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post featuring seashells arranged to spell “86 47,” a phrase President Donald Trump and his allies claimed represented a call for violence against Trump.
The since-deleted post, which Comey posted last year during a beach trip, generated a furor among Trump’s allies and a vow from the FBI and Homeland Security officials to investigate it as a threat.
The grand jury indicted Comey on two counts: threatening to kill or injure Trump and transmitting the threat in interstate commerce, via Instagram.
The term “86” generally means to “get rid of” or “eject” someone or something, and “47” is a reference to Trump’s presidency. Comey, who posted the image after claiming to stumble upon a “cool shell formation on my beachwalk,” has long rejected the suggestion that he intended it as a threat against Trump. He said he didn’t understand the term “86” to connote violence.
“I said, well, to me, as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place,” Comey told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace last year in an interview about the incident. “I said, that’s really clever.”
Comey deleted the post amid a furious response from Trump allies, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who said Comey should be “behind bars.” Trump himself told Fox News at the time that he believed Comey intentionally posted the image as a threat.
It’s the latest effort by the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against Comey, a longtime Trump adversary whom the president blames for embroiling him in a years-long investigation related to his contacts with Russia, a probe that weighed down his first term. Trump fired Comey as FBI director in 2017, triggering the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller and the Russia probe that dogged Trump for years.
Last year, Trump called on then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring unspecified criminal charges against Comey and other perceived foes, demanding immediate action. Within weeks, a prosecutor handpicked by Trump — his former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan — oversaw indictments against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both cases were thrown out simultaneously in November by a judge who found that Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney was illegal.
The Justice Department has also struggled to bring other politically explosive cases, including a failed effort to indict six congressional Democrats for urging members of the military to defy illegal orders and a recently aborted investigation of Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell that drew bipartisan condemnation from Capitol Hill.
The case against Comey comes amid a renewed focus on political violence following Saturday’s attack by an alleged gunman at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
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